Happiness: It’s both a long and short game, no matter the price of admission

Happiness: It’s both a long and short game, no matter the price

My patient has all the hallmarks of success: a nice house in an upscale urban neighbourhood; a son in private school; a year-round cottage; and a predilection for buying vintage Chris Craft pleasure crafts — all of it paid for with a high-paying Bay Street job. But, he complained, he wasn’t happy. His work wasn’t satisfying him the way it once had. Something wasn’t quite right.

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Most of us aren’t lucky enough to face such a problem. Heck, many of us are too busy struggling to make ends meet to spend much time worrying about job satisfaction. But what some may characterize as a malaise of the privileged can also, I think, illuminate a mistake we all make — the tendency to equate money with happiness.

I referred my patient — some of whose attributes I’ve changed to preserve anonymity — to a staff psychologist at my clinic, Dr. Gina Di Giulio. She approached his problem a bit differently from the way some mental health professionals might. Most would look at curing my patient’s depressive state. But Di Giulio set about attempting to bolster my patient’s happiness instead.

It’s a small but key difference in strategy. We’ve been studying depression for hundreds of years. Treating “negative” psychological symptoms has been the clinical paradigm. But is it possible we’ve been looking at things from the wrong direction? Why haven’t clinicians spent more time examining the determinants of happiness and well being?

In recent decades, that’s begun to change thanks to academicians such as Martin Seligman, Ed Diener and Daniel Kahneman. Rather than studying what goes wrong in the human psyche, they figured, why not study what goes right? The approach goes by different names, like “positive” or “hedonic” psychology, and it attempts to answer questions such as, “What makes us happy? What makes us satisfied with life?”

The patient I referred to Di Giulio was in his fifties, and had spent most of his life attempting to accumulate money. Many of the big names in the psychology of happiness have attempted to measure how closely money and happiness are linked. For example, Diener, a University of Illinois academic psychologist who established the Diener Life Satisfaction Scale, looked at an international Gallup survey of 136,000 people in 132 countries that examined whether happiness correlated with a person’s income.

Life satisfaction is only one component of overall happiness. Another component is whether one feels happy throughout the course of a day

The answer, published in a study he authored in 2010, was more complex than we might expect. Life satisfaction did increase with income, poll analysis revealed — but only to a certain point. There is an income threshold that provides financial security and comfort. Income also allows people to afford positive experiences, such as giving gifts, vacations with loved ones and hobbies. However, the effects tapered off as incomes rose. Above a certain point, accumulating more money was not an efficient way to increase life satisfaction.

According to Diener, life satisfaction is only one component of overall happiness. Another component is positive affect — that is, whether one feels happy throughout the course of a day. And that doesn’t vary with income. Instead, Diener says, one tends to feel positive emotions the more one feels personal respect, job fulfillment and social support. People with happier affects also tend to act every day in a manner consistent with their personal values. Kindness, a tendency to help others, sharing — these are behaviours that are linked to feelings of happiness.

Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and Princeton psychologist, published a paper in 2006 in the journal Science, which asked, “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer?” Based on survey data, Kahneman and his co-authors found the answer, in broad strokes, was no. “As income rises, people’s time use does not appear to shift toward activities that are associated with improved affect,” Kahneman wrote. As their incomes rose, people tended to work more, for example, which led to higher stress levels, rather than spending more time with family and friends, which decreased stress. Does the effort and time required to increase income make us forget to cherish the simple pleasures in life?

Probably, something similar was happening with my patient — and many others like him. “What he was facing isn’t uncommon with successful executives in their late forties to early sixties,” Di Giulio says.

Di Giulio encouraged my patient to spend more time on what really made him happy. He scaled back on work, spent more time with his son, started exercising and took up a new hobby — restoring a classic Chris Craft boat. I saw him recently. He looks great, and seems genuinely happy.

At the clinic where I work, we’re set to begin a shift similar to the one psychology has experienced over these last few decades.

Rather than just dealing with our patients’ moods when they mention they’re depressed, we would like to incorporate Diener’s life satisfaction survey into the physicals we provide. Over time, we hope to be able to learn important lessons about who feels happy and why. A proactive approach to health includes understanding the pursuit of happiness. After all, good health is true wealth.

—Dr. James Aw is the medical director of the Medcan Clinic, a leading private health clinic in Toronto. For more information, visit medcan.com.